This is the first report on my new project E-G-A.
It’s not really clear to me yet whether it will be a project or an adventure.
But let’s take it one step at a time.
Last year I reoriented myself professionally. I had some ideas about what I wanted to do in the future. One of them was to get involved in voluntary work.
It should be something exciting where I can get involved and, if possible, an assignment in emerging or developing countries. That all sounds very vague and not concrete enough for me.
That’s when I started to get an idea of what a voluntary commitment could be. It was clear to me pretty quickly that you don’t just say or do something on a whim. It is much too time-consuming for the organisation, the client and for myself. A colleague at work had explained to me his project, which he supports together with friends and which has been successfully helping people for many years. That was it.
“I go to Africa and help people build wells so they don’t have to carry drinking water so far and have clean water.”
This is a bad time for well builders; there is no demand for well builders at the moment.
It’s a very sharp jump from what I usually do. Namely “Introduction of Systems Engineering” . https://www.gfse.de
https://www.incose.org
Or to put it simply: I advise companies that want to change their development processes in order to efficiently develop complex and highly networked systems.
But now back to the well.
Sometimes you have to adapt your goals to changing conditions.
So it happened that I received a request to support a company in Ghana that wants to further qualify its employees in the field of vehicle electrics. The aim of the assignment is to be able to carry out maintenance and repairs on the electrical system of the company’s fleet of vehicles themselves. Today, the vehicles are parked for quite a long time and a service technician has to be called in even for minor electrical repairs.
Ghana is in Africa -> CHECK
I also know my way around cars -> CHECK
Ok, I thought, I’ll do that!
Well, it’s not quite that simple.
The whole thing is organised by an NGO, the Senior Expert Service https://www.ses-bonn.de/startseite . They take care of the processing, contacts, visas, accommodation, flights, interpreters and everything else you need. I bring the expert knowledge with me.
After an initial phase of euphoria, “Great, 8 weeks for free in Africa in the rainforest”, the phase of disillusionment and questions came relatively quickly.
“With the very poor description of the task, see above, and a duration of 8 weeks. What am I going to do with the people there all the time?”
And on top of that, the cars I’ve developed over the last few years are repaired with a laptop, or some programme parameters of the chassis control software are quickly changed so that the car is 1/10 of a second faster on the Nürburgring-Nordschleife.
I don’t think the company in Ghana has comparable cars in its fleet. There are rather different cars on the road in Ghana.
Now I’ve already said yes, but it doesn’t help, so I have to go through with it.
The question still remains: Why?
I’ll think about the answer until the next time.
#StayTuned
Leave a Reply